Most Common Exchange Server Issues and Their Solutions

Aftab Alam
Updated On - 12 Feb 2019

“The following article will inform you about taking useful precautions to increase the efficiency of your Exchange Server. If these vital points are overlooked, then you will have to face multiple errors at various stages of email communication.”

Microsoft Exchange Server has one of the most well-built architectures for highly secure email communication. Microsoft continuously brings updates and security fixes which increases the level of security. The health of the Exchange Server also depends on the various configurations and settings used in it. Any single misconfiguration or change in the settings may cause errors which may be quite hard to remove.

Optimizing Exchange Server storage

It is very critical for an Exchange Administrator to plan Exchange Server storage depending on the performance requirements and the sizing requirements of Exchange information store.
The average performance of Exchange Server speed is counted based on Input Output operations per second. The average IOPS value of a heavy Exchange user is 0.75, and the Exchange Administrator should plan the infrastructure keeping the IOPS in mind.

Efficient network routing for better email flow

Sometimes, mail flow errors come due to bad routing configurations. The Exchange Administrator should get complete information of SMTP virtual server and network connectors. If an administrator manages to use the connectors efficiently, then the mail flow gets better.

SMTP virtual server is a part of Exchange Service; it relates to a dedicated IP address and a port. But a connector may not belong to an Exchange server. There are two types of the connector – SMTP connector and Routing group connector. SMTP connector connects to messaging systems, and routing group connector connects an Exchange Server routing group to another group.

Constant Exchange Server monitoring

If the organization is not large, then the cost of the Exchange Server monitoring becomes quite high for it. That’s why the smaller and medium-sized organizations are much prone to data loss and hacking. Exchange Server can send alerts at various times to monitor mailbox behavior and services. These alerts provide information about the following features –

Hard disk utilization and performance

Growth of log files and Information store

CPU utilization

SMTP related parameters – health, performance, and connectivity

Issues with antivirus

When you configure an antivirus program, then you should make sure that you exclude Exchange databases, log files, and important files from the scan. If there is corruption in the exchange database or the log file, then the anti-virus may delete the file. In such a case, you may lose some important data.

Exchange Server Errors

These are multiple types of errors which make the Exchange data unusable. Here is a list of common Exchange server errors –

Kernel for Exchange Server recovery is the best-suited recovery tool for the businesses. It can recover not only the corrupt data but also the deleted ones. You can use it to access mailboxes and items from a corrupt Exchange database and save them to the desired destinations. The free methods to convert Exchange EDB to PST extends to saving the database to the Office 365, Live Exchange, Public Folder, and Outlook profile.